Front garden - little project

I had a bit of time to myself today, so I dug up a significant chunk of the front lawn.

There had been a recurring problem with my front garden. When the car is on the drive, there's not much room to get past without stepping onto the lawn. That means that there was always a patch that was excessively compacted and worn out.

So, today I dug up a strip alongside the drive. I removed several sacks of earth from the dig, so as to drop the height by about 3 inches. I have loads of broken flag stones and other bits and pieces, so I used some of those to make a loose mosaic of paving, with lots of wide gaps in it. Those gaps got loosely filled with small bits of broken brick that I had from when I knocked down the pointless wall in the back garden. I should say, I put weed control fabric under these stones.

I then realised it wasn't going to nit together very well seeing as I'd left it deliberately fairly loose, as I want to plant some hard wearing ground cover in it, so I empty a sack of compost into it and chucked loads of water on to wash it into the gaps.

Three sacks of gravel then went on top of it all, and then we whacked it down. I say we, I'd recruited a couple of helpers in the form of my son and my mate. When I say we whacked it down, we didn't have a whacker or even a roller, but we did have half a scaffold board that I'd found on the beach. We positioned this board on the new floor and jumped up and down on it until it seemed flat.

I'd like to say it looks good now, but it still needs a bit of time to bed in, and the lawn is still awful and is next on the list to sort, but at least it now means you can from the end of my drive to my front door without standing on the mud that is supposed to be lawn, and once its all cleaned up and planted up I reckon it will look ace.

Pics to follow, we were working by floodlight so not really possible to get a good pic just yet.

 

Your improvised whacker sounds like great fun, Clue!

Can't wait to see the pix, sounds like you've worked very hard today

 

And nice shiny shoes to enter the house in! I hate that - the first thing you've gotta do is plonk everything down ( it always slides and spills out of the shopping bag) and balance precariously to remove mucky footwear.
Well done that MAN !!

 

Fortunately we have no carpets downstairs, so although we inevitably trailed a bit of mess in as we came in and out to get stuff we needed, it was easily sorted with a quick go of the sweeping brush. It would be a nightmare if we had carpets in though.